In Strange Lands

The work of Axel Hütte (Essen, Germany, 1951) poses one of the most renewing and intelligent approaches in the current panorama to the representation of the landscape. A pupil of Bern and Hilla Becher at the Düsseldorf Art Academy in the 1970s, Hütte learned from his teachers not only a way of viewing architecture and space through photography but also the stance from which he poses his projects. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, while the artist was photographing buildings in Italy, he was struck by the prominence and uniqueness of the nearby landscapes, and this attraction led him to admit the landscape into his work, leaving aside the architecture that had previously predominated. From then on the landscape became the real protagonist of his pictures, and the idea of the journey and direct contact with the place he visited became the centre his work, establishing an interplay between objective and represented reality that draws subtle links between photography and painting. The show En tierras extrañas [In Strange Lands], organised by Fundación Telefónica, presents the results of a project undertaken by Axel Hütte in 2004. On a journey that took him to the Canary Islands, Belize, Mexico, New Mexico, Ecuador, Venezuela, Argentina, and Chile, the artist retrace the routes taken centuries earlier by explorers and conquerors searching for the New World. Cataloguing the high points of this journey to arcadias and remote locations, Hütte tries to invent another reality constructing the proper image with materials taken from nature. His gaze, however, continually evokes in us the primary experience of those who, in a voyage to the unknown, explore for the first time these unknown lands.